“Are you going to link your experiences to public domain?” the tech asks. “I think he would like to see what you experienced. Musta been pretty incredible.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“For that matter,” the psych tech added, “I’d like to link it, too.”
“I’ll think about it.”
So I am a real human being now, independent of you, my original.
There had been cheers and celebrations when I had emerged from the wormhole, but nobody had an inkling quite how strange my trip had been until I told them. Even then, I doubt that I was quite believed until the sensor readings and computer logs of Huis Clos confirmed my story with hard data.
The physicists had been ecstatic. A new tool to probe time and space. The ability to rotate space into time will open up incredible capabilities. They were already planning new expeditions, not the least of which was a trip to probe right to the singularity itself.
They had been duly impressed with my solution to the problem, although, after an hour of thinking it over, they all agreed it had been quite obvious. “It was lucky,” one of them remarked, “that you decided to go through the wormhole from the opposite side, that second time.”
“Why?” I asked.
“If you’d gone through the same direction, you’d have rotated an additional ninety degrees, instead of going back.”
“So?”
“Reversed the time vector. Turns you into antimatter. First touch of the interstellar medium— Poof.”
“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t thought of that. It made me feel a little less clever.
Now that the mission is over, I have no purpose, no direction for my existence. The future is empty, the black hole that we all must travel into. I will get a biological body, yes, and embark on the process of finding out who I am. Maybe, I think, this is a task that everybody has to do.
And then I will meet you. With luck, perhaps I’ll even like you.
And maybe, if I should like you enough, and I feel confident, I’ll decide to upload you into myself, and once more, we will again be one.